Yong Yin

Seru production, which merges the flexibility of job shops, efficiency of mass production, and environment friendly characteristics of sustainable manufacturing, largely for electronics assembly, is the latest manufacturing mode developed in Japan. It is receiving attention from Japanese practitioners and researchers. However, some attempts to implement seru production are unsuccessful, especially outside Japan. This is because of lack of knowledge of the specific means to implement seru production. The purpose of this paper is to provide a general framework and some basic principles that should be followed while implementing seru production for practitioners from a practical perspective. This work is based on a systematic analysis of many implementation experiences of seru production in Japanese manufacturing factories as well as a broad investigation of the popular literature information. The proposed framework can serve as a concise guide to help implement seru production in the manufacturing industry. In addition, constructive information is provided for researchers who would like to know and study the advanced manufacturing mode of seru production but do not understand the Japanese language.

In this article, we characterise the impact of product global performance on the choice of product architecture during the new product development (NPD) process. We classify product architectures into three categories: modular (neither interface is geometrically nested) integral (all interfaces are geometrically nested) and hybrid (some, but not all interfaces are geometrically nested). Existing studies show that the choice of a product architecture during the NPD process is a crucially strategic decision for a manufacturing firm. However, no single architecture is optimal in all cases, thus analytical models are required to identify and discuss specific trade-offs associated with the choice of the optimal architecture under different circumstances. This article develops analytical models that obtain a product's global performance through a modular/hybrid/integral architecture. Trade-offs between costs and expected benefits from different product architectures are analysed and compared. Multifunction products and small size are used as examples to formalise the models and show the impact of the global performance characteristics. We also investigate how optimal architecture changes in response to the exogenous costs of system integrators. Some empirical implications obtained from this study show that if the global performance benefit is sufficiently large, then modular architecture is an absolutely sub-optimal decision and integral architecture is an all-the-time candidate for optimal architecture.